New Photo And Sharing Features Added To SkyDrive

Microsoft’s SkyDrive Team is one unit of the company that seems to be always ahead of the curve. The company’s cloud storage solution regularly rolls out new updates, enhancing the experience for millions of end users that use it.

And with the looming arrival of Windows 8.1, these new features are coming in at just the right time.

Redmond has just now added some new (and for some, much needed) photo related features to the SkyDrive service. Photos were also the key focus back in May when the technology titan introduced the photo timeline feature.

Now this new update brings to the table even more photo additions to SkyDrive users — including support for more file formats as well as enhanced sharing options for images.

The SkyDrive blog has all the details on these changes and additions, primary among them being the ability to view high resolution photos on high DPI displays. Windows 8.1 includes dedicated options for high resolution monitors and this handy new option could not have come sooner.

SkyDrive will now automatically measure the DPI scale of a display, and on high resolution tablets and notebooks, or a 4K PC monitor, the service will show higher resolution photos and thumbnails.

Fans of the GIF file format can also rejoice — SkyDrive now allows viewing of GIF images with this new update. Microsoft has also added the ability to rotate photos in the SkyDrive folder, plus the ability to use photo filters in the “All photos” view, as was previously rumored.

Sharing images also gets the required attention this time around, and Microsoft has added a way to share individual group of files from anywhere on a SkyDrive account:

“You can share two photos from your camera roll, or a hundred. You can share a file in one folder along with another file from a different folder. And you can share different things with different people.”

The update offers what is being called the “Shared” view, which lets users keep tabs on which files they have shared along with what other SkyDrive subscribers have shared with the user. There is also an email shared option called “Recipients can edit” that lets people edit files share on SkyDrive.

And finally, developers can now edit even more text file formats in SkyDrive — such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML along with other code file types. And as expected, these too can be easily shared with other users who can edit them as well. Nifty!